KosAbility is a community diary series posted at 5 PM ET every Sunday and Wednesday by volunteer diarists. This is a gathering place for people who are living with disabilities, who love someone with a disability, or who want to know more about the issues surrounding this topic. There are two parts to each diary. First, a volunteer diarist will offer their specific knowledge and insight about a topic they know intimately. Then, readers are invited to comment on what they've read and or ask general questions about disabilities, share something they've learned, tell bad jokes, post photos, or rage about the unfairness of their situation. Our only rule is to be kind; trolls will be spayed or neutered.
Today's diarist is: Something the Dog Said
Let’s talk dyslexia, shall we? It has been a major part of my life and still is the bane of my existence some days. I am just about as dyslexic as you can be and still learn to read. I did not read at all until I was ten years old. If I had to do a report of something like that someone had to read me the material and I would then dictate what I thought should be written. I don’t know if you even remember a time before you could read, but I have really strong memories of looking at a page of text and not being able to understand a single word, that was third grade.
This is a little odd for me. Talking about this is one of those things that we didn’t do much when I as a child. The whole point was that even though I was very dyslexic that meant squat. As the Nuns would say "God gave you 20% extra work. It is not fair but it is what it is and you had better get started." Damned Penguins, I hated that but they were right. I was really quite lucky. I was surrounded by a group of people who were not going to let me fail to learn to read. You might think that sounds really nice and warm and fuzzy, but think about it for a minute. When you are told that failure is not an option but you don’t know if you can possibly succeed and it is taking years, then it becomes much scarier.
So what is dyslexia? Well that’s a really good question, I wish there was a simple answer. People will say that you transpose letters and numbers, which does happen to some folks but it really does not describe what it is. The fact is that while it is known to exist there is no agreement as to what exactly it is.
There is a problem with processing written and auditory language. Specifically there seems to be two separate problems that combine to make learning to read difficult. The first is being able to establish the connection between the letters and the sounds they make when put together. This makes the sounding out of words hard for kids with dyslexia because they really don’t get how the sounds and the letters work. They fumble around making guesses. This keeps them from getting the reinforcement they need to set the learning as to what words that they can say look like on the page.
This was particularly hard for me. I was one of those kids that talked really early. By 18 months I was making sentences (crappy ones, but Bozo Clown, Bozo Fun counts). I had a huge vocabulary that I was not shy about using by the time I was five, but I had no clue how all those fabulous words translated to the page. One of the reasons that it took me until I was ten to read was it took that long to build up enough words that I recognized the shape of that I could get the correct ones from the context. Trail and Trial look exactly the same to me (even now) so if the sentence is about a court case I can be reasonably sure that it is not trail, but only reasonably sure, I won’t actually know unless I sit and look closely at the word.
The other issue with dyslexia is processing. There is something crossed in the processing of images in the brains of dyslexic folks. The eyes are fine, it is just that when the two images hit that area of the brain where we "see" the world they don’t always come together correctly. For reading print this is a real problem, since letters will be edited out or over lap and appear in the wrong places.
It also works going out. I can be thinking of writing "diary" which I know is spelled d-i-a-r-y and write or types it "d-a-i-r-y" and never, ever know the difference until some kind soul (or snarky wise ass) points it out or makes a point about cows keeping a journal. I just can’t tell the difference and am just as likely to write one as the other, even when I am writing them multiple times in a row (side bar – I had a teacher who was sure I could learn to spell if I got the muscle memory of the words, so one summer I had to write my fourth grade vocabulary words 100 times each, ten words each day. It sort of worked, but mostly it didn’t. Nice idea though)
This image integration problem has other strange affects. When I was working as a waiter at a restaurant on the U of Michigan campus one night I put down my order pad on the pass bar. It was all stainless steel and was about twenty feet long. It was the end of the night and it was clear of everything except my pad. I looked back to where I knew I had put it and could not see it. The images of the long stainless steel counters were integrated in a way that edited the pad out. I looked for about ten minutes before going back to the pass bar to find it right where I had thought it was before. Just one of the daily joys of dyslexia.
So where does this disorder come from? Well part of it is almost certainly evolutionary. We have been reading widely as a species for only a few hundred years. It is a very odd thing for animals to do, symbolic representation and it is only in the very recent past that it has become de rigor for daily life . There is also the fact that more men than women are dyslexic and more left handed folks than right handed folks. If you are a left handed man there is a better than 50% chances that you have some level of dyslexia. If you have dyslexia you have a 17 to 24% chance of also having ADD or ADHD. Clearly there is something going on with brain architecture and chemistry.
Is it the worst thing in the world to by dyslexic? Hell no. Again the Nuns would say "I wept that I had no shoes until I saw a man with no feet". There are much bigger challenges to overcome than dyslexia, take it from one who has been there. But the key to it is to start early and work hard in a coordinated fashion. So, recognizing that your child might be dyslexic is really important. Here are a few things that are common to most dyslexic kids that should raise some flags.
Bad depth perception – This goes to the image integration problem. I have really crappy depth perception from time to time even now. I can always tell as the distance looks like a movie screen, at a certain point, everything gets flatish. There are days when it is so bad that I can hold my arms out and my hands are beyond that barrier. It is really weird, but that has not happened as much now that I am an adult.
So if you see your toddler starting to crawl down the stairs from five feet away, that might be a sign that they have some depth problems.
No rhyme recognition - This seems to be part of the auditory processing issue. Kids who can’t hear how rhymes work may be prone to problems with learning to read.
Lack of letter recognition – This one is tricky. I have a great memory. I knew all my letters by the time I was two, but that was memorization. I couldn’t tell you the sounds reliably or get how they interacted.
The best thing is of course to watch your child and be involved in getting them reading early. If they have trouble, don’t pass it off as bad teaching or just being slower in this area, get it checked out so they don’t suffer.
Today I read voraciously. I read somewhere above 300 words a minute with complete comprehension and really high retention. Sounds great, eh? Well, it is and it isn’t. I work at it every single day. If I have not read for at least an hour I can’t go to sleep and the whole time I am trying to read faster and retain more. Why? Well you see I have this dread. My biggest fear is that tomorrow I will wake up and go to read something and it will all be gone. I will be back to being 10 years old and looking at that page that makes no sense.
I got past this problem by never quitting, by never being able to stop trying to read for a day. Now I have it in the back of my head that if I do stop, then it will all go away. So, joke about dyslexia if you like, I make them all the time, but never wish it on your worst enemy, it is something that is unfair and never goes away. At the same time if you have a child who has it, or you have it yourself, the reality is you can get around it. It is as those damned Penguins said, you’ve got extra work, it is not fair, but life isn’t fair. Better get to it.
The floor (I spelled the right, right?) is yours.